Susan Feinberg is the foaming-at-the-mouth genius whose social breeding is so par excellence that she saw fit to interrupt Congressman Paul Ryan’s dinner and scold him over the beverage selection of the men he was having dinner with. The woman actually walked up to him while he was eating dinner, and thought, ‘ya know, NOW would be an opportune time to vomit my progresso-liberal jargon all over him.’

The story goes as follows: she was at the same high-brow restaurant he was at. She has such an amazing life that, rather than enjoy her birthday dinner at said swanky restaurant, she decided to ignore her dinner guest — her husband (a catch, I’m sure) — and stalk Paul Ryan’s life. What was he eating? What was he drinking? How expensive is it? Let me look up what he’s ordering off of my menu and look at the price! Let me take pictures of other people while they’re masticating. Let me take pictures of wine bottles, as if I’m unearthing some big, huge monumental story that will set MSNBC and all four of their viewers on fire.

“Susan Feinberg, an associate business professor at Rutgers, was at Bistro Bis celebrating her birthday with her husband that night. ”

Bistro Bis? I wonder, if Susan Feinberg is such a champion for the little people (i.e. one of Bruce Springsteen’s progressive class-heroes for the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed), why was she at Bistro Bis when she could have been celebrating her birthday at some liberal-class-conscious approved mom & pop restaurant? I mean, obvious question: what was SHE doing at Bistro Bis??

This is the whole problem: Republicans-Conservatives-Libertarians LIKE MONEY!! We LOOOVE money! We make no bones and have no qualms about being filthy, filthy rich. Why? Because we don’t wear the guilt of class- consciousness like Progressives do. So we never need apologize for spending OUR OWN personal money and things we want to spend money on. And we’re not hypocritical when we say, Social Security and numerous government entitlements need to be reformed or cut because they’re not financially viable as they presently stand, and, in some cases, what we’re really saying is, government has no right to spend my money — my private property confiscated by the government — on Obamacare, ACORN, Media Matters, an omnibus spending bill to avert a “disaster” of epic proportions. The larger point we’re making is that these social programs, and the subsidies that keep them afloat, are useless and inefficient, and whenever government is empowered to handle people’s lives for them, mediocrity and waste soon follow.

Do you see the difference yet, Ms. Feinberg? Paul Ryan and his friends can spend their money any way they like. Why? Because it’s their money. Barack Obama has no right to spend my money on his worthless social programs. Why? Because it’s not his and he didn’t earn it. It’s not his money to spend.

“When she saw the label on the bottle of Jayer-Gilles 2004 Echezeaux Grand Cru Ryan’s table had ordered, she quickly looked it up on the wine list and saw that it sold for an eye-popping $350, the most expensive wine in the house along with one other with the same pricetag. ”

“”We were just stunned,” said Feinberg, who e-mailed TPM about her encounter later the same evening. “I was an economistso I started doing the envelope calculations and quickly figured out that those two bottles of wine was more than two-income working family making minimum wage earned in a week.” ”

Where to begin? She’s an economist, you see? So it’s because of her highly specialized skill as a highly trained economist — now a Professor of economics — that she was able to use her mysterious powers of multiplication and deduce that 350 — two times! — equals 700. Did you see how the genius economist did that? See, 350 x 2 = 700. She’s an economist! You’re not. You’d never been able to figure that out because you are not an economist. You’re just, ya know, whatever you are. But she was able to do the “envelope” calculations — in her head, I’m presuming, right? without the benefit of even a calculator!! — and she quickly determined the tab. Amazing stuff.

We at the Darjeeling Express would like to know Mrs. Feinberg’s tab for the evening. Items on the dinner entree range from $22 to $33. Couldn’t she have donated that money to a homeless shelter, relief funds in Haiti, the survivors of the Fukushima nuclear power plant explosion? How many lives could she have enriched? Rather than being selfish and celebrating her 70th (?) birthday in a big, flashy way, she could have made a real difference in people’s lives. We hope the birthday debauchery was worth it, lil’ miss working class hero.

“She was outraged that Ryan was consuming hundreds of dollars in wine while Congress was in the midst of intense debates over whether to cut seniors’ safety net…”

She was “outraged” that a person was spending money — his own money — on a beverage? She was completely livid that a man was enjoying the finer things in life (i.e. a particularly expensive bottle of wine). How in the world does a person like that get through the day filled with that much animosity and anger toward other tax-paying human beings?? Tell us, Mrs. Feinberg, what is Paul Ryan allowed to spend his money on? If not an expensive bottle of wine, then what? What if, instead of the wine, it had been the Citrus Crème Brûlée ($10.00)? Would you have complained about that? Would have gone straight back to your academic-funded pad, ON YOUR BIRTHDAY, and celebrated by writing an email to some lefty rag about how Paul Ryan spent $10 on a Crème Brûlée? Let’s say you were at McDonald’s (work with me now) and you saw Paul Ryan spend money on a Big-Mac meal and a chocolate sundae — would you criticize him for spending $3 on a chocolate sundae as seniors are dying? OR would you have praised him for cutting back by dining at a fast-food restaurant?? Of course not. You would have snarked on him for taking in so many calories when we have an obesity epidemic going on. (I could do that if it’s Obama eating three chili dogs, because his punk-ass and his wife’s are trying to instruct me on what I should or shouldn’t be eating. Hypocrisy aside, it would be fine, except I’d rather they just shut the hell up) Do you see the problem with going after someone for their spending choices (when it’s their money)? It doesn’t work.

““It was my birthday, and I’d had half a bottle of great wine with dinner,” she wrote in an e-mail to TPM”

Oh, and how much did your bottle cost Feinberg?? Was she justifying her expensive, fancy-schmancy meal as being on account of her birthday? Normally she dines at soup kitchens, but today, this one day of the year, she decided to spoil herself?! A ‘great wine’ with dinner? She has to add the ‘great wine, right? Typically she’d say, “no, I prefer to have a crappy wine when I dine at Bistro Bis!” Such a pretentious tool. They have to spice up their experience as if they’re living up some imaginary F. Scott Fitzgerald standard of email writing. Who cares that you had a great wine?? It’s not necessary to clarify that in your email to TPM. No one cares. This is about your asshole-of-the-week deserving behavior, not the wine. I’m guessing, if hers was a great wine, then Paul Ryan’s was infinitely better. Hey, Susan, be honest: are you jealous that Paul Ryan had a better wine than you did? There you are in your academic cubbyhole getting paid marginally for your contribution to our skulls full of mush, and there’s Paul Ryan sipping a $350 wine. Isn’t that what’s really upsetting you?? That an uncultured, mouth-breathing, gauche REPUBLICAN(!!), like Paul Ryan, is feasting and savoring on that which should only belong to the cultured elite underclass and the lips of the great Greek gods.

““I wasn’t drunk, but I was certainly emboldened to speak my mind.” ”

Liberals don’t need to be drunk to be uncivil tools, but the alcohol certainly emboldens the liquid courage of those who are insecure about themselves. Here’s a woman who goes to great pains to express that she is an economics professor, but when she finally comes face to face with Ryan, she doesn’t actually even bother engaging him on economics. She goes with the class warrior stuff which any 8th-grader with a Rage Against the Machine record can do. She must know that Paul Ryan is a pretty exceptional mind. The man can effectively articulate his thoughts on entitlement reform better than anyone, and she knows that. Down deep she suspects that this non-economist, Paul Ryan, whose entire body of knowledge is self-taught and a result of desire, is actually better at what Susan Feinberg does than she is AND he’s in a position in his life to actually do something about it. Unlike Feinberg, who is stuck in a thankless job drawing supply and demand curves ten times a week. She loathes Paul Ryan for pwning her on her own turf.

“After ending their meal and paying the check, Feinberg decided to give Ryan a piece of her mind. She approached the table and asked Ryan “how he could live with himself” sipping expensive wine while advocating for cuts to programs for seniors and the poor. Some verbal jousting between Feinberg and the other two men ensued. One of the two men said he had ordered the wine, was drinking it and paying for it. In hearing how much the wine cost, Ryan said only: “Is that how much it was?”

The clash became especially heated when Feinberg asked the men if they were lobbyists.

“F—- her,” one of them replied and stood up in a menacing way, according to Feinberg’s account. Feinberg said her husband then “puffed out his chest” in response before the manager and a waiter came over and Feinberg decided she had said her piece and it was time to leave.”

Puffed out his chest? Please send a picture. We heard Mr. Feinberg’s eyes bugged out and he looked more like this:

Susan: If his chest seemed to puff out, perhaps he got a good up-close look at Paul Ryan and your husband’s nipples got hard for the first time in years. Maybe?

“Feinberg said all three men were “droning on loudly during the evening that liberals think that if you’re a millionaire, you have done something wrong.”

Perhaps Susan was projecting her own views onto Ryan. (as if Susan Feinberg would disagree with the above statement?!)

Ryan said the discussion focused on monetary policy and QE2, the Federal Reserve’s second round of quantitative easing, i.e. efforts to bolster the economy through the purchase of $600 billion in long-term U.S. Treasury bonds.”

And, for the record, it looks as if Paul Ryan wasn’t actually the one who decided to order the wine. His friends — two economists — opted for the wine.

Here’s Paul Ryan’s take:TPM: …she was saying, is it appropriate for you guys to be ordering that kind of wine $350 dollars-a-bottle?

Ryan: “A.) I didn’t order it. B.) I had no idea what it would cost, and C.) …I bought one of these bottles even though I drank a glass, and I always pull my own weight for my meals.“

TPM: That was very smart. … But do you think it’s appropriate now that you know how much the wine cost to be drinking [such expensive wine] when you’re advocating cuts for seniors?

Ryan: “I think it’s stupid to pick up that much for a bottle of wine under any circumstance.”

TPM: But you had to pay for it…

Ryan: “Yeah, I was like this is ridiculous. Who buys wine that expensive? It surprised me, and I think it’s stupid under any circumstance to pay anything close to 100 dollars for a bottle of wine.

TPM: So you wouldn’t do it again?

Ryan: “Well, of course not, because I think it’s too much money to pay for wine. Yeah, I don’t really know what exactly it cost. It was expensive. But um, 250 maybe it was 250, I don’t really remember.”

I’m curious if Ms. Feinberg has any actual experience in the private sector. Her linkedin resume below. Look at any economist’s resume and observe the uninterrupted continuity from their bachelor’s degree to their professorship. Do you see any breaks where the subject may have worked an actual job? Or has the subject been teaching all her professional life?

It looks like from ’87 to ’91 there was a bit of a gap. Maybe she worked somewhere. To be sure, economists don’t have to work in the private sector or own a small business to understand economics. But then there’s this article ( Stephen L. Carter’s “Economic Stagnation Explained, at 30,000 Feet” in Bloomberg) from May of this year. A Yale economics professor who concludes: ” As an academic with an interest in policy, I tend to see businesses as abstractions, fitting into a theory or a data set. Most policy makers do the same. We rarely encounter the simple human face of the less- than-giant businesses we constantly extol. And when they refuse to hire, we would often rather go on television and call them greedy than sit and talk to them about their challenges.

Recessions have complex causes, but, as the man on the aisle reminded me, we do nothing to make things better when the companies on which we rely see Washington as adversary rather than partner.”

I don’t know how anyone can have the gravitas of being an economics professor, never have any real world experience with small businesses, and then talk about jobs, business, entitlement cuts, etc. as if they know what the hell they’re really talking about.

So, Susan Feinberg, our asshole-of the-week, if you want to play dress up, walk to your silly economics class at Rutgers, and pretend you do something important with your life, by all means — knock yourself out. But when you talk about throwing away tax-payer money on bloated government social experiments and necessary goods, etc., realize one thing: you’re playin’ with my money now.

I was a professor at Rutgers, and am currently a professor at another local university. It saddened me greatly to read in today’s Star Ledger how a Rutgers senior professor embarrassed herself and the entire academic community. We know the facts are true, for this professor wrote a column in the newspaper.

She went to a restaurant. She noticed a U.S. Congressman eating at a nearby table. She went over to him and embarrassed herself, the Congressman and his guests, and the other patrons by complaining that he spent too much money on his dinner. The Congressman had every right to reply to the professor as did Governor Christie, saying it was none of her business. Instead, Congressman Ryan politely responded to Professor Feinberg that he did not pay. This did not satisfy the professor, who then accused Ryan’s dinner guests of violating the law. She is not a law officer, and has no right to make such accusations in public. I do hope they sue her for her behavior. If the professor felt a law was broken, she should have written up the details and presented it to the relevant authorities. It also shows that Governor Christie may have known that he had to respond the way he did!

We expect teachers and professors to set positive examples to the community, which Professor Feinberg failed to do.

There is a more serious point to this story. In the same newspaper, a letter writer wrote about the dumbing down of America. “Our ability to gather and understand facts, analyze and test them and draw informed and credible conclusions has significantly declined. This is what happens when we ignore or undermine facts, knowledge, reason, and science.” Professor Feinberg complained to Rep. Ryan that he is working to take away Americans’ benefits. The facts are the opposite. The Federal government does not have the money to continue paying benefits such as Social Security. If the Democrats have their way, our seniors will not get their benefits. Obama is already stating that if the debt ceiling is not raised, Social Security checks may not go out. Congressman Ryan has a plan that will give seniors all the benefits they were promised. Younger people will have to plan for other arrangements. This is the only logical plan that can save Social Security.

My concern is for the professor’s students. If she treats her students the way she treated the Congressman, she is doing a disservice to her students. Rutgers University may want to look into this matter. If she uses strong emotions rather that clear analytic reasoning, she is not acting as a professor should act.

If we “gather and understand facts, analyze and test them” we will understand that socialism has never worked anywhere, and so the present path of Obama and the Democrats towards socialism cannot possibly work.

Professor Feinberg should have praised Congressman Ryan for his efforts to lead our country America away from socialism, by weaning people from an unsustainable national benefit program.

This is just a prime example of university professors believing they are somehow above it all. That they are special, that they exist on some moral high-ground where these kinds of emotional, nonsensical and outrageous outbursts are acceptable and cool. So many university professors are just stuffed shirts. Arrogant elitists who hide behind the progressives mask of concern for social injustice and the underdog.

They hide their racism, sexism and classism behind a lot of fake platitudes about wanting and fighting for social justice for those who cannot speak for themselves. They take bizarre steps to demonstrate their passion for social injustice by accosting a group of complete strangers and making a lot of moral assertions about their characters simply because they are spending their money the way they want to. On wine during dinner. They ignore the blatant question, HOW or WHY is this woman any better than these men? As SHE was also dining at this same Sin City, decadent restaurant where EVIL bottles of $350 wine are served?? Hmmmm…food for thought no?

Its a very good point made in the comment above. IF this woman, uneducated as she obviously is, naive as she obviously is, (her comment about how she is an economics professor and able to so simple math was PRICELESS. Talk about the DUMBING DOWN of America!! ) is so willing to accost a complete stranger in such a potentially violent manner, how is she going to treat her young, vulnerable students at Rutger?? Its a valid and perfectly reasonable question.

Professional behavior in a university setting requires the ability to be logical. Not emotional. It requires professors who support students and are able to communicate effectively with faculty and staff. That does NOT generally involve accosting people and yelling at them in a crowded restaurant. This woman has demonstrated she has an obvious lack of logic and professionalism, due to her childish, sophomoric and immature outburst. That her husband felt he had to posture aggression only indicates a woman who uses others in her expression of anger. She should look into counseling. Its clear she could benefit from it. And Rutgers administration and faculty should keep a close eye on her. Where there is smoke, there is generally fire and often these kinds of unstable university professors engage in a pattern of negative, self sabotaging behavior.

As a second year grad student, with approximately four more classes before I walk, I could tell countless tales of the arrogant and manipulative professors I’ve been forced to deal with. There are many good professors out there in various universities across the US and just as many who should be terminated. Listen up Rutgers, this woman could end up going down a similar path.